Portugal has some of the most liberal drug laws in Europe. In 2001, it became the first European country to abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. At recommendation, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The U.S. should adopt this type of solution for drugs.
The first argument is that prison drives addicts underground. Meanwhile, the other argument was that incarceration is more expensive than treatment. People found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment, which may be refused without lawful punishment.
Critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to “drug tourists” and exacerbate Portugal’s drug problem. Portugal did have some of the highest drug use in Europe. The recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise. The paper found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, but the number of people seeking treatment more than doubled. Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal’s drug use numbers are impressive. Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%, the US had the most comparable, people over 12 was at 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana. The report also stated that that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%. Lifetime heroin use among 16 to 18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8%, but a slight increase of marijuana use in that age group. New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. The number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040. And the money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well. “Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success, it has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney who conducted the research.
Portugal’s case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world’s harshest penalties for drug possession, yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world.
“I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn’t having much influence on our drug consumption,” says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S. because of the differences in size and culture of Portugal and the US. But there is a movement in the U.S., in the legislatures of New York State, California and Massachusetts to reconsider our overly harsh drug laws. Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter proposed that Congress create a national commission, not unlike Portugal’s to deal with prison reform and overhaul drug-sentencing policy. Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners.
Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Maryland, like Kleiman, is also skeptical. He said in a presentation at the Cato Institute that “It’s fair to say that decriminalization in Portugal has met its central goal. Drug use did not rise.” He notes that Portugal is a small country and that the cyclical nature of drug epidemics may account for the declines in heroin use and deaths.
Greenwald argued that a major problem with most American drug policy debate is that it’s based on “speculation and fear mongering,” rather than empirical evidence on the effects of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country’s number one public health problem. “The impact in the life of families and our society is much lower than it was before decriminalization,” says Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, Portugal’s “drug czar” and president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction. Goulao added that police are now able to re-focus on tracking much higher level dealers and larger quantities of drugs.
With the success Portugal has had with its decriminalization, the US should take in consideration that it would decrease the rates of many drugs, many diseases, and it would free up money and resources that could be put to better use. Just like alcohol was prohibited in the 1920’s, it didn’t work. It drove up death rates, and illness, but it didn’t stop the people from making and distributing it. The US should adopt a similar system that Portugal has and put it to use.
Szalavitz, Maia. “Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?” Time. Time Inc., 26 Apr. 2009. Web. 12 Feb. 2015. <http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html>
Leto Fenn 